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All Rise...

Appellate Judge Mac McEntire is the genius of his living room.

The Charge

The scientists who changed the world.

The Case

In the late 17th century, no one knew what a flea actually looked like. To
them, it was a tiny black dot, invisible unless you somehow held one right up to
your eye. Robert Hooke was a poor, scrawny, and allegedly hunchbacked young man
consumed with the idea of what those little bastards really were. To get to an
answer, he constructed what history now remembers as the first compound
microscope, and he placed a flea under the glass. "What he saw must have
taken his breath away," says evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. The
flea was not a mere black dot, but a truly alien creature, with metallic-looking
skin, glass-like eyes, hideous tufts of hair, and multiple legs ending in
vicious hook claws. This small moment opened up the entire world to the unseen
all around us, and Hooke went on to become one of England's top scientists.

Cool story, huh? Anecdotes like that are everywhere in five-part series
Genius of Britain.

Each episode of the series covers five or six scientists from an era,
beginning with the mid-1600s and jumping ahead each century per episode until it
reaches the present day. The episode is introduced by Dr. Stephen Hawking, and
segments on specific scientists are narrated by modern-day British scientists in
the same field. There's usually a theme running throughout the episode, showing
how all of the historic scientists' work combined resulted in a major discovery
or invention.

Sounds pretty boring when I describe it like that, isn't it? Fortunately,
the creators offer info on not just the scientists' discoveries, but their lives
and personalities as well. This gives the whole thing some genuine human drama
to go along with the tech speak. Who knew that Halley, discoverer of Halley's
Comet, traveled around the world on the high seas in his younger days, battling
and defeating pirates? Or that Isaac Newton was so eccentric and antisocial that
he often argued and fought with others in the scientific community? Some of
these great minds were amazing wealthy, living it up among high society, while
others were crud-poor, devising world-changing inventions originally to make
their squalid lives easier.

If there's anything the many scientists profiled have in common, it's
obsession. Once they get an idea or question in their heads, they are driven to
find the answer, no matter what. The earlier episodes were far more
entertaining, when science was about traveling the world and building crazy
contraptions. As we get closer to the present, tinkering becomes blueprints and
exploration becomes lab work. That's not to say that the 19th and 20th century
scientists didn't make major contributions, it's just that their stories didn't
quite have that same "Adventures in Science" feel to it. The final
episode has Hawking and Dawkins sit down for a chat about where they believe
science is headed in the future.

Throughout the show's five-episode run, everyone shows disdain for
superstition, especially when talking about good ol' Charles Darwin. Darwin
didn't publish his famous theory of evolution for many years, fearing what the
dominating church would think of it. The interviewees in this series hold Darwin
high up on a pedestal, barely hiding their disdain for anyone who dares disagree
with him. What I'm trying to say here is, if you're super-religious and on the
other side of the Darwin debate, then this is totally not the show for you.

For a bonus feature, we've got a third disc with a whole other movie on it,
Stephen Hawking and the Theory of
Everything, in which Hawking discusses his ongoing search to discover how,
specifically, the universe came into being. In addition to his brilliant mind
and all he's accomplished despite suffering from a debilitating disease, another
of Hawking's gifts is his ability to make far-out, complex concepts easy to
understand for ordinary folks. This includes topics like quantum mechanics,
string theory, and the M-force. (Didn't the M-force fight the X-Men that one
time?) Also, there are biographies of the show's presenters, and a 12-page
booklet containing additional science facts.

I had a lot of fun with this one. It's filled with interesting stories and
intriguing personalities who helped shaped the world of science over the
centuries. Anyone with an interest in history and, yes, science should check it
out.